"Sharing the Burden of Education": The Emergence of Public-Private Partnerships for Early Education

• In Event: Interrogating Governing Discourses in Early Childhood and Childhood Studies and Policies Through a Foucauldian Lens

Abstract

Public-private partnerships in education are getting an increasing centrality in both international and national agendas. This paper’s concern is with the growing presence of philanthropy in the realm of education in Turkey. Its particular focus is on early education that currently constitutes one of the trendiest spaces for a wide variety of philanthropic activities and organizations designed to correct social problems and promote the public good. The aim is to examine how early childhood education (ECE) comes to be configured as a focus of philanthropic activity, why, and with what consequences. In its attempt to understand the configuration of ECE as a focus of, and for, a philanthropic activity in Turkey, this paper draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality (1991, 2008) and on the studies guided by this concept” (for example, Ball, 2007; 2012 & Franklin, Popkewitz, & Bloch, 2003). The paper consists of three sections. In the first section, I look at a variety of early education projects into which individual and corporate philanthropy has been/is being invited to work with various kinds of actors including the government and NGOs. In the second section, I direct my attention to the methods of philanthropic activity. In this section, my focus is also on the concerns and motives of the involvement of philanthropic actors in these projects and also the portrayals of these philanthropic activities in the media. In the last section, I provide an analysis of the “effects” of philanthropic activity in terms of leading to new and “particular” conceptualizations of education, care, the state, society, and citizen.

Author

• Sabiha Bilgi, Abant Izzet Baysal University